Purify
by cenotaphy
Summary: What happens to the boy with the demon blood when he drinks angel blood? One-shot. Set at the end of season 4, right before Sam gets out of the panic room.


The metal cuffs are cold against Sam's skin, despite the cloth wrapped around his wrists to protect them from his incessant struggling. The ceiling of the panic room is at once too bright and too shadowy-indistinct. The need for blood has surpassed craving, surpassed desire; the thirst is a worm within him, eating away at his insides. It empties him out. Devours his organs, hollows out his bones, filling his empty husk with fire. Sam burns, and his throat is raw with crying out.

Through the roaring in his ears he hears the rasp of the bolt, and the panic room door slides open. Sam turns his head and squints in bleary-eyed bewilderment as Dean enters. The elder Winchester's face is drawn and stern, his eyebrows drawn together in a grim frown. He has one hand shoved into a pocket.

Sam quails in spite of himself, remembering. _You're nothing to me._

"Dean," he tries to say, but his dust-dry tongue cracks the word to smithereens before it can leave his mouth.

"Please," he tries to say, and can only manage the last sound, a pathetic hiss of breath that echoes weakly in the still room.

Dean stands over him, looking down, his face shadowed. He pulls a glass bottle from his pocket. A dark red liquid sloshes inside. Sam sees the bottle, sees the blood, and the worm inside him rears its ugly head.

"Just a little," says Dean, not unkindly. "Just to ease you off."

Sam swallows past the knife lodged in his throat, tries with partial success to wet his lips. "You don't–you don't mean that." It's a trick, it has to be, Dean is–Dean is–Dean wouldn't–

Then Dean unscrews the cap and the scent hits Sam's nostrils, and he forgets everything else, everything is drowned out by the thunderbolt-crash of need and desperation, and before he knows it he is half-up, straining against the cuffs, his breath coming in loud gasps, almost in snarls, his focus contracted to only the bottle in Dean's hand.

And Dean _gets_ it, he does, his big brother knows what Sam needs now, as he's always known. He places the mouth of the bottle against Sam's lips and tips it, and Sam tilts his head back and drinks. He drinks frantically, desperately, savagely, barely tasting it, only caring that somehow the warmth of it is quenching the fire of his insides.

"Easy, tiger," mutters Dean, as Sam drains the bottle. Sam turns his head away, gasping for breath. He can feel the blood working on him, feel his head clearing, his skin cooling from its fever high.

He shoots his gaze back toward Dean. He can feel blood coating his lips. "Thanks," he whispers, and the word comes out thick with shame.

Dean caps the bottle, but just stands there, as if waiting. What does he want from Sam? What can Sam possibly give him? _I tried so hard to pretend that we_ –he pushes it down, won't let himself dwell on the memory of Dean's sneer. Dean is here, now, he cares, he's not going to let Sam die, he's not going to let Sam burn in here, alone.

A sudden, ice-cold spike of pain jabs up from his stomach and lodges somewhere in his ribs. Sam gags. He suddenly can't swallow. Panic floods his synapses. "Dean–" he croaks.

Dean cocks his head, surveying Sam with interest.

Sam gags again, then tries to breathe and realizes he no longer can. He chokes on nothing, back arching of its own accord. More ice sprouts in his chest. It's different than the pain of withdrawal: sharper, colder, more precise. "Dean–" he tries again.

His brother leans over him. "Feeling something, Sammy?" His tone is light, conversational, but the cruel twist of his mouth warps the nickname to something ugly.

More spikes of cold, more creeping numbness, and suddenly Sam feels white-hot agony shoot through his entire spine. He can't help it: he screams aloud, seizing on the panic room table as his vision flashes blank for a moment. He tastes honey and snow, and more blood, his own this time.

Dean clamps a hand down over Sam's mouth, silencing him. He leans his weight into it, holding Sam down as the younger man spasms.

"Angel blood, Sam," he says. "Castiel was kind enough to make a donation. And you sucked it all down like the addict you are, without stopping to taste."

Sam tries to turn his head but Dean's hand keeps it in place. In any case his muscles are twitching and jerking of their own accord, unresponsive to his efforts. He can feel the corrosive touch of the angel blood now, smoking him out of his own veins. His head is filled with a hurricane roar, a torrent of light and sound. Voices he was never meant to hear, radiance he could never hope to deserve. His thoughts splinter with the weight of it. He is too small for this. He belongs in the dirt and the darkness. Not this. Not this.

His eyes fill with tears. The ceiling of the panic room swims and blurs. Again that lightning touch of pain, branching out from his spine. He screams into Dean's hand.

"Castiel thinks it'll cure you faster," says Dean, still matter-of-factly, as if he is speaking to Sam across the kitchen table, as if Sam is not being burned away beneath him. "Cleanse the demon blood from your system." He removes his hand at last, and Sam is free to howl into the silence between them. Which he does now, the sound ripped from him. His chest has been smashed open, he thinks. He can feel the air seeping in like a frost, clenching its incorporeal fist around his frantically hammering heart.

"Me, though," Dean continues, putting his hand in his pocket, "I think you're too far gone for that, Sam. The boy with the demon blood, and something _pure_ is going to fix you? Not a chance. I think this angel blood is going to torch you out of that skin. That's what you are, right? Some parasite living in something I used to call my brother. There's nothing clean left in you to cure."

Sam's teeth are chattering uncontrollably. He thinks he can hear the cracks of his bones breaking, each crunch accompanied by a fresh sunburst of pain. "Dean," he begs, getting the words out in staccato gasps, "Don't. Dean. Just. Please–"

"Please what?" growls Dean. "Please what, Sam?"

Sam lets out a strangled half-sob. "Help me."

"Help you?" snaps Dean. He fists a hand in Sam's hair and twists, forcing Sam to look at him. Sam can barely make him out; his vision is suffused in unbearable light, a white glow without mercy. "This is what I do, Sam. I hunt things. I save people. We both know which you are."

"I'm a person," Sam chokes out. Dean lets go of his hair; Sam's head thuds back onto the table. "I'm your broth–" Something inside grabs his lungs and _wrenches_ , and Sam gulps helplessly for air and jackknifes against his restraints, and he is cold, so cold, there is purifying fire like ice consuming everything he is because _unclean_ is everything he is, and all this light is bursting through him, destroying him on its way out because he could never hope to hold it in, and dimly he is aware that Dean is vanished from his side, or maybe he was never there, and Sam screams without sound and everything is fire and cold and light.


End file.
